RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe outside world barely enters into the cosseted lives of the Sorensons ... Of course it’s not the responsibility of every novel to wrestle with cultural shifts, with politics and war, but the near total absence of even a whiff of non-Sorenson-related events over 40 years and 500-plus pages must be a conscious choice. It reads, eventually, as a deliberate and fascinating commentary on how a particular kind of moneyed white family can choose the degree to which they engage with such … unpleasantries. And that sometimes they choose zero degrees ... At this point you may be thinking that there’s no way four women can spend an entire book being obsessed with their happily married parents ... But here’s the thing — Lombardo renders that obsession with such skill and finely tuned interest that it feels like a quiet subversion of the traditional family saga, a new way for the past to bless or poison the present and an unexpected engine for the revelations about being human that she delivers so beautifully.
Stephanie Powell Watts
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWatts writes about ordinary people leading ordinary lives with an extraordinary level of empathy and attention. 'One of the tricks of time,' an older character realizes, 'is that your own ordinary life took on a sweetness in the retelling' ... The Great Gatsby is, at its core, a book about wanting things. Watts is interested in what black people are allowed to want — and allow themselves to want — in 21st-century America, and what it takes to venture a real claim for a place, a home ... The ways in which No One Is Coming to Save Us intersects with and veers away from Fitzgerald’s familiar plot can be very rewarding. (In one small but perfect joke, Gatsby’s dock becomes J?J’s deck.) Every departure can be seen as a sly comment on what it means to be a person of color in today’s America ... When Gatsby didn’t get what he wanted, the story could only end with his death, but Watts’s characters are people who have seen generations of dreams stymied and thwarted — for their kin, their community and themselves. Rather than giving up if the game doesn’t go their way, they do what they’ve always done: Forget the rules, shake up the players and turn Gatsby’s green dock light gold.
